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MOPA Staff Blogs

I am a runner. That is a very significant part of who I am as a person. When not battling injury, I run six days a week. I do it to challenge myself and to test my limits in races of varying distances. As a runner, many of my friends are runners as well. So when I heard about the bombing at the Boston Marathon yesterday, I was scared. I was sad. I was angry. My thoughts kept jumping from one emotion to the next. I know a lot of people who ran the marathon and I was worried that they may have been in the area. I thought of the peopl

Yesterday I participated in the “Day in a Chair” event in Balboa Park, a program coordinated by the Balboa Park Learning Institute in partnership with HeadNorth. I spent the morning of my day in a wheelchair going about my routine in the workplace. It was an eye-opening experience that taught me a lot about accessibility at MOPA.

One thing I have learned in my several weeks here at MOPA is that the photographic arts can be challenging. I think of photography in a classic camera-film-picture sort of way. But that is a rather limited view. First off, the term photographic arts includes more than just pictures or still images. Video and film are very much a part of this category. After all, a film or video is merely a sequence of images strung together in a rapid fashion. But this was not the challenging part.

One of the most exciting things I discovered during my internship at MOPA is what is going on behind the scenes of a museum. I went to many exhibitions before and I wondered how the art pieces got there – it couldn’t be a miracle that they just somehow got there by themselves, there must be a story behind their origins. Some people had to work hard to make these visits possible. So, I was really curious to see how a museum operates every day and how a team can organize exhibitions and museum events.

When it comes to curating exhibitions, one of my favorite experiences is working with contemporary photographers. It allows for the interaction I would never be able to have with the masters who have paved the way, like Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Harry Callahan and Ruth Bernard. Towards the end of last year, I had the pleasure of meeting some wonderful photographers for MOPA’s upcoming fall exhibition Staking Claim: A California Invitational.

For a Collections Manager, getting a new collection is a bit like Christmas. The anticipation builds each day as you prepare to bring the boxes of items to the museum. Then, you feel the excitement of getting to unpack each one and discover the treasures inside. Finally, a feeling of satisfaction as you survey all of the wonderful things that will soon be housed in the museum’s collection. Happily, for those of us in the Curatorial Department, we’ve gotten to experience all of these emotions over the past few weeks as we inventory MOPA’s most recent acquisition: the

Like most people, I enjoy watching movies. By no means do I consider myself a film buff, but I can get lost in anything from a blockbuster to a quirky independent movie. One of the reasons I was excited to start working at MOPA was the rich film culture here. From the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, to numerous foreign films and now the Cinema Select program, MOPA seems to always have some screening coming up.

Well, this is the start of my fourth week here at MOPA. I must say I am impressed by this museum. Truth is I never had any ambitions of working in a museum. My former world was in the music industry and the main reason I worked there was simply because I love music. And everyone that worked in the music business also loved music.

I just started my internship in the department of marketing and communication at the Museum of Photographic Arts last week. I am a French college student graduating at the end of this year in the field of communication and culture. I chose to intern in a museum because I’m currently thinking I would like to work in one next year. My mother always took me to museums as a child and I always liked discovering and learning new things about art. But you may ask me, why a photographic museum?